Delivery of time-sensitive data streams such as VoIP packets in an infrastructure wireless network, such as a QoS enhanced basic service set (Q-BSS) that conforms to the IEEE 802.11 standard, including IEEE 802.11e or Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) that is based on a subset of IEEE 802.11e, continues to be challenging. There still are issues to be resolved to achieve relatively high voice quality.
Some time-sensitive data communication, e.g., voice communication needs to maintain constant bit rate (CBR) per call basis. In order to provide the constant bit rate, many small packets are constantly transmitted. Use of known IEEE 802.11e mechanisms to carry such relatively small frames can significantly hurt the bandwidth efficiency expressed, for example, as the percentage of the total bandwidth used for application data transferred over the radio interface. In addition to bandwidth efficiency, there is a bottleneck issue in the downlink direction from the access point. One central access point (AP), e.g., a quality enhanced AP (Q-AP) pushes multiple speech frames to multiple client stations associated with the AP.